Aerospace

Happy Thanksgiving Comet ISON: Nice Knowing You?

C/2012 S1, Comet ISON, is intriguing because it has never approached the sun before and that is scientifically terrific.  Comet ISON began in the Oort cloud almost a light year away and has traveled for over a million years. Unlike more famous comets, Hal ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 28 2013 - 4:00am

Teen Brigade: Youth Radio Station Helps Telescope To Track Space Junk

Australian astronomers have derived a catchy way to prevent catastrophic, multi-billion dollar space junk collisions-  by listening in to the radio signals generated by stations like the popular youth network Triple J.  The project spearheaded by Curtin U ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 3 2013 - 8:00am

Over 100,000 New Cosmic X-Ray Sources: The First Swift X-Ray Point Source Catalog

An international team has published a major list of celestial X-ray sources in the Astrophysical Journal- over 150,000 high-energy stars and galaxies. Using the X-ray telescope on board the US/UK/Italian Swift satellite, the team analyzed eight years' ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 17 2013 - 6:30am

Abell 2744: Pandora's Magnifying Glass

Hubble's Frontier Fields observing program is using the magnifying power of enormous galaxy clusters to peer deep into the distant Universe and Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora's Cluster,  is  the first image. Astronomers previously observed Abell ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 9 2014 - 6:30am

Happy 10th Anniversary, Mars Express! Thanks For The Video

Can you believe it's already been 10 years? Before there was a cute Rover on the Martian surface, delighting us with pithy commentary on Twitter, we had Mars Express paving the way. Ten years ago, on 14 January 2004, it took its very first images, in ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 14 2014 - 12:26pm

Deep Space Sleep: Rosetta Wakes For The First Time In 31 Months

Rosetta is currently chasing down Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will become the first space mission to rendezvous with a comet, the first to attempt a landing on a comet’s surface and the first to follow a comet as it swings around the Sun. But ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 20 2014 - 2:44pm

Cassini Captures A Massive Storm On Saturn

It looks more like a painting than a real-life event but this image from the Cassini orbiter shows the progress of a massive storm on Saturn.  The head of the storm is towards the left of the image, where the most turbulent activity is shown in white, but ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 3 2014 - 9:41am

Partner With NASA And Go To The Moon- But Why?

When President Obama took office in 2009, among his first priorities was to cancel the Constellation program, mostly because it had George Bush's name on it, though that was behind a veneer of 'too expensive' and would take too long.  ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Feb 6 2014 - 2:10pm

Solar Black: Primitive Charcoal Pigment Protects ESA Solar Orbiter Mission

Sometimes you don't need fancy modern compounds- primitive cavemen had the answer. Burnt bone charcoal, used in prehistoric cave paintings, will be applied to the ESA’s Solar Orbiter titanium heatshield to protect it from the Sun’s close-up glare.  So ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 12 2014 - 11:15am

Here's Your Chance To Get 450 Space Inventions For Free

ESA, the European Space Agency, is my favorite space organization. Yeah, I said it. The guy whose favorite movie is "The Right Stuff" and who could write a whole book on the Mercury program prefers the ESA over NASA. The reason is because ESA car ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Feb 21 2014 - 11:18am